What does it mean to discover something?
The Name of the Rat – New York Times
It is a touchy use of the word “discovered” when a rodent that Laotians routinely eat is purchased at a market and then declared to be a new species. Just think of the debate over saying America was discovered by a European who stumbled over it 12,000 years after humans first settled there. But until field researchers found the animal on sale in Thakhet, and lab analysts identified it as a separate species, the foot-long critter that Laotians call kha-nyou, or rock rat, didn’t have a scientific name.